Will Hurricane Harvey Launch a New Kind of Climate Lawsuit? Scientists can now link “acts of God” to climate change. That could give victims the power to hold someone accountable, say lawyers.

Courts have already used science to influence climate policies around the world. For example, in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a form of air pollution, based on evidence that such emissions were changing Earth’s climate. In 2015, a court in the Netherlands ruled that the Dutch government must adopt stricter goals to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, and a Pakistani farmer successfully sued his government for failing to implement its own climate policy framework, leading to the creation of a new court-ordered climate change commission in Pakistan. Other significant cases are still in progress, including one by a group of American youths who are suing the U.S. government on the grounds that U.S. climate policies violate their rights to life, liberty and property.

Climate science is increasingly making its way into lower profile cases as well, according to an analysis published last week in the journal Science. The researchers looked at more than 800 U.S. cases involving climate change or coal-fired power plants between 1990 and 2016, and found a dramatic rise in both the number of climate cases and the proportion that relied on scientific evidence, according to first author Sabrina McCormick, a sociologist at George Washington University in Washington. McCormick and her co-authors reported no conflicts of interest with respect to the new research.

via Will Hurricane Harvey Launch a New Kind of Climate Lawsuit? | Inside Science